Out on the Rim

Chapter Five

A shirtless Otherguy Overby, wearing only baggy chino walking shorts and a pair of laceless New Balance jogging shoes, stood in front of the open four-door garage, waiting for water and trying to decide what to drive to the Los Angeles International Airport. He could choose from a Mercedes 560 SEC sedan; a Porsche 911 cabriolet; a seven-passenger Oldsmobile station wagon; or a high-sprung, four-wheel-drive Ford pickup.

He had almost decided on the Mercedes when he heard the truck grinding up the long gravel drive. He turned to watch as the Peterbilt tractor-cab nosed around the corner of the enormous house and shuddered to a stop, air brakes hissing. Coupled to the Peterbilt was a tanker containing ten thousand gallons of fairly pure water that wholesaled at two cents a gallon.

Luis Garfias, the young Mexican driver, lit a cigarette and stared down at Overby for several seconds, as if trying to place him. He finally nodded in the self-satisfied way some do when they’ve managed to match a face to a name. “Your water, Señor Otherguy.”

“You’re late, Luis.”

Luis Garfias smiled and blew out some smoke. “Your mother,” he said, put the Peterbilt in gear, and started creeping toward the ten-thousand-gallon water tank that rested on a man-made earth mound just to the right of the drive. The mound was high enough to raise the bottom of the tank level with the roofline of the two-story house, thus permitting gravity to do its work and send water flowing to the nine bathrooms, two kitchens, three wet bars, two Jacuzzis and one laundry room, not to mention the octagonal swimming pool that twice a year required twenty thousand gallons all for itself.

Now wearing a paisley tie, starched white broadcloth shirt, well-tended black oxfords and what he thought of as his gloom-blue suit, which seemed a size or so too large, Overby opened one of the two large refrigerators, removed two bottles of San Miguel beer, snapped off their caps and served one of them to Luis Garfias who sat slumped in a chair at the round kitchen table whose top had been fashioned out of two pieces of invisibly bonded rare old maple and would easily seat eight.

Garfias looked at the beer’s label. “Who likes this Flip beer — you or Billy?”

“Me,” Overby said, pouring his own beer into a tall glass. “Billy doesn’t drink.”

“Anymore.”

“Anymore.”

Garfias drank two swallows of beer from the bottle. “Mex beer is better.” He had another swallow. “But this ain’t bad. So when’s Billy getting out?”

“Friday,” Overby said, sitting down on one of the custom cane-bottomed chairs that surrounded the table.

“She coming back?”

“No.”

Garfias glanced around the huge kitchen, obviously pricing an O’Keefe & Merritt restaurant-size gas range, two microwave ovens, a commercial freezer, the twin refrigerators, a double rack of copper pots and pans, and an assortment of other appliances that may or may not have been used in the past year or two. “Christ,” Garfias said, “he built this fucking place for her.”

“He’s going to sell it,” Overby said.

“How much it cost him — to build and everything?”

“About two point seven.”

“What’s he asking?”

“One point nine, I think.”

Garfias shook his head regretfully, as if he had just decided not to make a counteroffer after all. “Never get it. Not without water. Tell me this. How come somebody smart as Billy, when he’s not on the shit anyway, how come he builds a place without no water?”

“There was water when he built it. Four wells.”

“How long’d it take ’em to go bad — one month? Two? Three maybe?”

“A year.”

“They lasted about as long as she did.”

She was Cynthia Blondin, the estranged 23-year-old companion of Billy Diron who was a founding member of Galahad’s Balloon, a rock group that had made him a multimillionaire by the time he was 28. Now 39, Billy Diron had nearly completed the prescribed four weeks at the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs for his addiction to alcohol, cocaine and the occasional toot of heroin.

“So what’re you gonna do when Billy gets out — stay on?”

“I’m a house-sitter,” Overby said. “Not a nursemaid.”

“Whatcha got lined up — anything?”

Overby glanced at his Cartier tank watch. “I’ll know this afternoon.”

“But you’re still paying the house bills — the gas, phone, electric and all?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you mizewell pay mine.”

Garfias reached into a pocket of his faded blue Levi’s jacket and brought out a pink statement. He passed it to Overby who saw that the bill was $100 more than the $200 it should have been. He rose, walked over to the kitchen counter drawer, took out a three-tier checkbook and brought it back to the table. Then he filled out a check — already signed by the incarcerated Billy Diron — for the exact amount of Garfias’ pink statement.

When finished, Overby put down the pen, neatly tore the check out and extended both hands, his right offering the check, his left prepared to accept the $50 dollar bill Garfias had almost finished folding lengthwise into fourths. The check and the $50 dollar bill were exchanged simultaneously.

When Booth Stallings walked off the United flight at 3:46 P.M. and into the arrival-departure lounge of Los Angeles International Airport, the first thing he noticed was the sign that had been neatly lettered on the coated side of a shirtboard by a sure hand with a felt pen. The sign read: Mr. Stallings.

The man who displayed the sign without any visible self-consciousness was somewhere in his early forties and had one of those too still and too careful faces that are frequently worn by men who have something to do with the law — either its enforcement or its avoidance.

Stallings also noticed that the man’s expensive dark blue suit seemed to be a size or so too large, as if he had lost ten or even 15 pounds and, by grim resolve, had made sure the weight stayed lost. Stallings automatically classified the suit as a patently false testimony to steadfast character.

Carrying his only luggage — a scuffed buffalo hide Gladstone he had bought in Florence years ago — Stallings walked toward the man with the sign. When they were seven or eight feet apart they made eye contact, an act of mild bravery that Stallings had noticed fewer and fewer Americans were willing to perform.

The man’s cool blue-green eyes seemed to slide over Stallings, dismissing him. Stallings walked 15 feet past the man, stopped and turned.

The man with the “Mr. Stallings” sign stood patiently, examining each of the 200 or so male economy passengers who were still filing off the Boeing 747. The man stood with his feet a little less than 18 inches apart, his back straight, his pelvis tipped slightly forward. It was the posture of someone who knows all there is to know about waiting.

Stallings retraced his steps until he stood just behind the man with the sign. “Otherguy Overby, I’ll be bound,” he said.

If he hadn’t been watching for it, Stallings might not have caught Overby’s slight start that was really no more than a twitch. But Overby didn’t turn around. Instead, still watching the arriving passengers, he said, “I figured it was you from what that son-in-law of yours told me over the phone. An old crock, he said, who’ll be wearing funny cheap clothes, a barber college haircut and walks with kind of a waltz. Hard to miss, he said.” Overby turned, with no discernible hurry, and examined Stallings with the same time-wasting care. “He was right.”

“Where do we talk?” Stallings said. “Here, there or in the bar?”

“Unless you’re all done with the ha-ha stuff, we don’t. If you are, I’ve got somewhere in mind.”

“Let’s go.”

“You check any luggage?”

With the look of one who has just been asked a particularly stupid question, Stallings turned and headed for the escalator where a four-color photo of the mayor who would be governor beamed down on arriving passengers.

When they reached the Mercedes on the second level of the parking garage across the street from the United terminal, Stallings gave the car a dour glance and then turned to Overby. “Yours?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“You still got something against the Krauts?” Overby said, unlocking the car’s doors and slipping behind the wheel.

Stallings opened his own now unlocked door, tossed the buffalo bag onto the rear seat and climbed in. “I just don’t much like dealing with anyone who needs to wear fifty-five thousand dollars worth of car.”

Overby started the engine, shifted into reverse, changed his mind, shifted back into park and stared at Booth Stallings. “What are you, Jack — some kind of act?”

Stallings smiled his smallest smile. “Didn’t that son-in-law of mine mention it? I do the old coot.”

Overby put the car into reverse again. “It kind of gets on the nerves.”

“It’s supposed to,” Stallings said.

Neither spoke again until they were on the San Diego freeway and heading north. It was then that Stallings finally asked, “Where’re we going?”

“Malibu.”

“Jesus,” Stallings said.

When they neared the off ramp to the Santa Monica freeway, Stallings spoke again. “Which way’s Pelican Bay from here?”

Overby flicked a glance at Stallings and then looked back at the road. “South.”

“Tell me about it — you and Pelican Bay.”

“You already know or you wouldn’t be asking.”

“What I know,” Stallings said, “I got out of the California newspapers in the Library of Congress. It lacked a certain savor.”

Overby didn’t reply until he reached the Santa Monica freeway and had the Mercedes over in the far left fast lane, heading for the Pacific Coast Highway at a steady 60 miles per hour.

“I’ll tell it just once,” Overby said, “and if you want more, then you’d better try the library again.”

“Fine.”

“Okay The chief of police of Pelican Bay and I made a little money on a certain deal that there’s no need to go into. His name was Ploughman. Chief Oscar Ploughman. So we decided to invest in a political campaign and run him for mayor. Of Pelican Bay. I’d be campaign manager and later share in the satisfaction that always comes from good honest government.”

“The graft,” Stallings said.

“You want to tell it?”

“No.”

“Then just listen. The chief wants to build himself a real old-timey political machine. And since I’m bankrolling about half the campaign nut, he’s even started calling it the Ploughman-Overby machine, at least to me and him, if not to anybody else — except he always calls it the powerful Ploughman-Overby machine. The chief was a case.”

“Apparently,” Stallings said.

“Well, we put on one hell of a campaign and then he goes and dies on me Election Day afternoon.”

“Of a heart attack,” Stallings said. “Or so I read.”

“Yeah,” Overby said. “Of a heart attack. But the old bastard still won, lying in the morgue there with a tag on his toe, and if you think they really don’t tie the toe tags on, then you haven’t been to the Pelican Bay morgue where I went to make sure the asshole was really dead.” Overby gave the steering wheel a hard thump with the heel of his right palm. “But we by God won it going away — fifty-three point seven to forty-six point three — and him dead as Sprat’s cat.”

“He did have a bad heart then.”

“What he had,” Overby said, “was a yen for cupcakes — fifteen-, sixteen-year-old cupcakes. Election afternoon, right up there in the victory suite I’d already rented for him, two of ’em gave him what must’ve been one hell of a ride — his last one anyhow — because he died in the saddle, probably smiling that big yellow smile of his, and that was it for the powerful Ploughman-Overby machine.”

“And you became house-sitter to the stars.”

Overby glanced at Stallings. “I like to live well even when I can’t afford it.”

“Who got you started — in the house-sitting trade?”

“A guy I once did a favor for.”

“A guy with a name, I bet.”

“A guy named Piers who’s married to the Lace in Ivory, Lace and Silk. Remember them? The Armitage Sisters?”

“I seem to recall they sang awfully loud.”

“Yeah, I always thought they were pretty good, too.”

Stallings nodded thoughtfully and then spoke more to himself than to Overby. “Piers and Ploughman. Piers, Ploughman.”

“No connection.” Overby said.

“There was in a poem a long time ago.”

“When?”

Stallings tried to remember. “About six hundred years back.”

“You jacking me around again?”

“No.”

They drove on in silence until they neared the Third and Fourth Streets off ramp that led to downtown Santa Monica. It was then that Overby asked, “You really a Ph.D. like that son-in-law of yours claims?”

“I really am.”

Overby nodded comfortably, as if the last few pieces had clicked into place. “After I talked to him, what’s his name, Mott, I went down to the Malibu Library and checked out that book of yours, Anatomy of Terrorism.”

“Anatomy of Terror,” Stallings said, unable to resist the correction.

“Yeah. Right. Well, I read it. Most of it, in fact, but then I quit about three-quarters through. Want to know why?”

“Not really.”

“Because I couldn’t figure out whose side you were on.”

“Good,” Booth Stallings said.